2018: The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, adapted by Kate Mulvaney

Charlie, Dolour (above), Rowena
Program Cover

The Harp in the South: Part One and Part Two, by Ruth Park, adapted for the stage by Kate Mulvaney.  Sydney Theatre Company at Roslyn Packer Theatre, August 16 – October 6, 2018.


Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 29

The time came when I knew I had to leave my green islands [New Zealand] and find a wider world, so I went to Australia and married D'Arcy Niland, a young short story writer. For a while we led a wandering life. I saw a little of this vast, magnificent land, and was captured for ever by its noble indifference to humankind. I felt that one day this continent would give a shrug and shake all the humans off into the sea. But it would still be its own self. That's what I call identity.
Text Copyright © 1988 Ruth Park, Photos © Niland Collection.
http://www.ruth-park.com.au/

Ruth Park
Sydney, 1940s

As an Evolutionary Marxist, a late teenager in 1959 with the ambition to write the great Australian novel (despite my very recent £10 Pom arrival), I attached myself briefly to the periphery of the Sydney Realist Writers’ Group, headed by the Communist, Judah Waten.  I was blissfully unaware that Ruth Park had already done what I never managed to do, when she published The Harp in the South a decade before, after it was judged Best Novel in the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald Competition in 1946.

I caught up by performing Lick Jimmy for Broken Hill Repertory Society in 1965. https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/event/101397 .  Directed by Kay McLachlan, the play was by “writer Ruth Park, adaptor Leslie Rees” but I haven’t been able to source a copy.  Ted Mosher, the Barrier Daily Truth reviewer, wrote under the headline Harp in the South plays well at Repertory “it is a play which will touch your heartstrings presenting as it does a pathetic-cum-humorous picture of the inhabitants of Sydney's poverty-stricken Surry Hills tenement district.”

12½ Plymouth Street, Surry Hills
Photo: Daniel Boud

Kate Mulvaney, in this massive 6 hour adaptation, has added an element of anger to Ruth Park’s novel, which she has Dolour express in a major damning speech about the treatment of women. 

It’s interesting to listen to Ruth Park http://education.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1454074/harp-in-the-south
saying “one of the quaintest criticisms was because I wrote about poor under-privileged people I was a communist and in the same mail … I was a capitalist … I was making money out of them.”  She goes on to describe her “absolute bewilderment” because she thought of her book as a “domestic comedy” – “a funny book”.

That’s how I remembered playing Lick Jimmy, who never spoke except for one line in Mandarin as he gave Roie a Christmas present.  The role was comic because he had no toilet in his next door fruit and vegetable shop.  Several times I would knock on the Darcy’s door with an anxious look, hurry through and out the back, reappearing a few minutes later with a satisfied expression, smiling sweetly on my way back next door.
 
This was the expression of warmth and community in this perhaps 2-hour play in 1965.   I never quite had that feeling while watching a quite fascinating complicated picaresque naturalistic narrative through Part One.  Some way into Part Two, which is staged as a more obviously symbolic drama, I cottoned on to a through-line concept which Mulvaney has used to give purpose to the story. 

In the novel, three elements come and go at times throughout.  The Darcy culture is centred on a romantic view of their ancient pre-Christian Irish heritage, distant in time and place.  In the present is the conflict between the rigid institutional injunctions and the socially inclusive ethics of the Catholic Church.  The third concern is the black-white divide in Australia. 

You may not be familiar with the old Irish figure of Death, who appears in the guise of someone real to take a real person ‘away’.  In Mulvaney’s play, this is the little boy Thady, Hugh and Margaret Darcy’s only son, who disappears aged six soon after they move to Surry Hills.  He reappears to ‘take away’ Hugh’s brother Jer, Margaret’s mother Eny, and his own sister Roie.  J M Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows is the Irish play which encapsulates the feeling, the inevitability and mystery of death which has clearly inspired Kate Mulvaney to open her play with Thady speaking to us.

For the Catholic matter, think of the story of how Australian teacher Mary McKillop became a saint and you’ll recognise Sister Theophilus, Sister Beatrix and Father Driscoll on stage here.

In the novel, Charlie Rothe – who marries Rowena and after her death finally lives on with his son Michael and her younger sister Dolour – has a great grandmother who he knows was Aboriginal.  In despair after Roie’s death, Charlie considers suicide but changes his mind after a chance meeting with an Elder.  In the novel, Ruth Park does not play up the mysterious nature of Aborigines in this encounter, though some of her characters do, at the same time as using the ‘n’ word.  Kate Mulvaney has given Angus McIntosh more to say to Charlie, in the role of an Elder teaching and giving traditional understanding to an uninitiated man, than in the novel.  Ruth Park had Charlie come to his own realisation simply as a result of Angus’ kind treatment of him in his distress.

Charlie and Roie's Wedding
Guy Simon and Rose Riley
Photo: Daniel Boud

So, has Kate Mulvaney done the right thing by her author, Ruth Park?  The Genesian Theatre, in their production some 15 years ago, called The Harp in the South ‘bitter-sweet’.  This Sydney Theatre Company production, though there is often laughter, especially in Part One, is far more bitter, while Park in the novel is surprisingly – and therefore powerfully – even-handed in presenting the motivations, feelings and understandings of her characters across the board, both of the perpetrators and receivers of bad behaviour.  Ruth Park’s calm objectivity shows the individual behaviour as the result social inequity.  In doing so, she exposed the worst of behaviour by men towards women, while her comedy keeps genuine love a real possibility.  Kate Mulvaney’s mood is a little less inviting, I feel. 

The production – as we have come to expect of STC, from the direction by Kip Williams; the stage, costumes, lighting and sound designs; and of course with such a wonderful 20-member cast playing at least 50 characters over three generations – is highly engaging throughout.  I was happy to see Part One at a 1:00 pm matinee and Part Two at 7:30 pm the same day, but since the style of Part Two is quite distinct, it would do no harm to have a day or two’s break between.

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: The Misanthrope by Moliere, translated by Justin Fleming

The Misanthrope by Molière, a new version by Justin Fleming.  Bell Shakespeare in association with Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney Opera House Playhouse, August 28 – September 28, 2018.

Previewed by Frank McKone
August 28

I think I can say without reservation that
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin and Justin Fleming at
the game of couplet rhyming are equally exquisite –
so please make sure you pay them both a visit.

Their minds surely meet over four centuries fleet
In this stage production which is such a glorious treat
That even the very first preview had the audience on their feet.

Enough!, I say, but it is absolutely true that Fleming’s adaptation of Molière’s often vicious rhyming, satirising the pompous wealthy of his 17th Century day, works as well as ever for tearing strips off our modern Me, Me, Me middle class.

Even better – sex role reversal opens up the issues of individual integrity, purity and honesty, and the conflict of interest between reason and love, in a new way for a modern audience.  The old convention of the beautiful but a bit naïve young woman having to deal with two men both claiming to love her, but with very different motivations, is more than turned on its head when Alceste is now a woman, Cymbeline (Célimène) is a man – but so is Orton; and  Philinte (a polite and tactful man for Molière) becomes Philippa, whose object of romantic attentions is Éliante, still a woman now known as Eleanor, Cymbeline’s sister.  The puritanical prudish Arsenio, remains male, as up-himself as ever today as he was 400 years ago.

The clever idea in this production, I think, is that Eleanor is the Stage Manager – the most practical and unassuming person, working hard in a backstage setting that I’m sure Jean-Baptiste would instantly recognise, to get the dramatic cats herded.  This setting is a great original idea which opens up theatrical opportunities in wonderful, satirical and very funny ways.

The cast enjoyed the first run, including a couple of interesting improvisations, as much as we did and you will:

Alceste – Danielle Cormack        Arsenio – Simon Burke
Eleanor – Catherine Davies        Cymbeline – Ben Gerrard
Philippa – Rebecca Massey        Orton / Cleveland – Hamish Michael
Angus – Anthony Taufa

Director – Lee Lewis            Designer – Dan Potra
Lighting Designer – Matthew Marshall
Composers and Sound Designers – Max Lambert and Roger Lock
Voice Coach – Jess Chambers    Choreographer – Kelley Abbey



© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Venus in Fur by David Ives

Venus in Fur by David Ives.  The Street Theatre, Canberra, August 22 – September 2, 2018.

Director – Caroline Stacey; Stage & Costume Design – Imogen Keen; Sound Design – Kyle Sheedy; Lighting Design – Verity Hampson; Accent Coach – Dianna Nixon; Movement Coach – Emma Strapps

Performed by Craig Alexander as Thomas Novachek, playwright/director; Joanna Richards as Vanda Jordan, aspiring actress

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 25

In David Ives’ clever and intriguing play, Venus in Fur (singular), we see fictional Thomas Novachek as author/director of his (Novachek’s) adaptation for stage of Venus in Furs (German: Venus im Pelz - plural), an 1870 novella by the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. 

Good Reads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427354.Venus_in_Furs describes the novella: 
'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man's struggle to enlighten and instruct himself and others in the realm of desire. Published in 1870, the novel gained notoriety and a degree of immortality for its author when the word "masochism" - derived from his name - entered the vocabulary of psychiatry. This remains a classic literary statement on sexual submission and control.

Novachek waits in frustration, bombarded by magnificent frightening thunder and lightning, for his idea of a woman who can play Wanda von Dunajew.  He complains that in the old days a 24-year-old would have been married with five children with life experience enough to play the part – but nowadays 24 year-olds just chatter inanely in silly high-pitched voices like 12-year-olds.  Vanda Jordan clatters down the steel staircase to the only audition space Novachek can afford, a concrete basement, sounding exactly like the woman Novachek does not want.

You don’t need to have read Venus in Furs to understand Venus in Fur, though it might be interesting to do so; but I certainly do not recommend reading the summaries and study guides you can find online of Venus in Fur before seeing the play.  Much better to be surprised by the unexpected.  All I will say is that role reversal is a key element of the play’s exposure of male/female relations.

The acting by Joanna Richards and Craig Alexander, under Stacey’s direction, makes the complex transitions between their ‘real life’ roles and their roles as Severin von Kusiemski and Wanda von Dunajew look easy.  The coaching by Dianna Nixon and Emma Strapps has worked so well that we bit by bit are drawn into sensing the depth of the changing relationship which is the essence of the play – David Ives’ play, that is.

Though I find whistles, whoops and hollers an unpleasant form of applause which has become the modern fashion, I have to agree that this production is top quality from set, costume, sound and light design through to the acting, all showing a true integration of all the theatrical elements not always seen even in major company productions.

Craig Alexander (behind) and Joanna Richards
in Venus in Fur by David Ives

 Then there is the play itself.  Ives has written in the best of American tradition – Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams come to mind – where stories from the past become deeply felt expressions of character and disturbing new ways of understanding the present.

Venus in Fur is small in scale compared with Mourning Becomes Electra, or Streetcar Named Desire, but it comes to grips with today’s central issue of the treatment of women.  When Joanna Richards, playing Vanda Jordan as Wanda von Dunajew, throws her line like a javelin in the face of  von Masoch / von Kusiemski/ Thomas Novachek / Craig Alexander, saying how as a woman actor in his play she is “denigrating herself”, the modern state of tension in the power-play of men and women suddenly becomes reality.  We even saw it played out this last week at the top level of government in this country.  Chaotic men still dominate, destroying the career of the woman who was probably their best bet to retain government.

But wait till you see how this play, written by a man, ends.  Maybe there’s a kind of hope after all.  Though as Shakespeare wrote “True love never did run smooth”, love doesn’t have to be quite as painful as von Masoch suggests – if men and women treat each other as true equals.

Craig Alexander and Joanna Richards
as Thomas Novachek and Vanda Jordan
in character as Severin von Kusiemski and Wanda von Dunajew
in Venus in Fur by David Ives
Photos: Street Theatre

 © Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Mirusia - From The Heart Tour

Mirusia Louwerse
July 2017
Photo: Belinda McDowall

Mirusia – From the Heart Tour.  Mirusia Louwerse with Graeme Press (musical director and composer on piano), Leo Kram (violin) and backing singer Shannon Robinson.  At The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, August 25, 2018.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

At the end of a seemingly interminable week of vicious internecine political shenanigans at Parliament House in Canberra, feeling distinctly cynical, what a welcome surprise it was to find myself feeling warm and fuzzy, even a bit teary as Mirusia ended her second encore singing along with her upstanding audience “I am, you are, we are – Australian” on Saturday afternoon in our great little theatre, The Q, in Queanbeyan.

Mirusia’s joke was to thank us for making her feel more than a human being (‘humanbeyan’).  We made her feel a ‘Queenbeyan’.

Her concert of classical songs, music theatre and even the old folk song ‘Botany Bay’ focussed on heart and home.  Her theme is how, after ten years living in her parents’ home country, Holland, she remained homesick for Australia and the Brisbane of her birth and upbringing – finally succeeding in ‘importing her husband’ Youri who mans the sales desk in the foyer, where you are encouraged to buy the album of the show and donate to the Australian Children’s Music Foundation.

From the Heart is an unpretentious presentation of Mirusia’s journey from Brisbane, her success at the Queensland Conservatorium in Australia, where at the age of 21 she was announced as the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Dame Joan Sutherland Opera Award, and her career touring the world for 10 years “as a featured soloist with the Johann Strauss Orchestra. This much loved orchestra is based in Maastricht, Netherlands and is led by the acclaimed violinist, André Rieu.”

Mirusia with André Rieu, 2016

Bringing Mirusia to The Q was a mark once again of the success of Stephen Pike and his team in providing a range of quality attractions to our region.  From the Heart indeed.

I have only two suggestions. 

I wondered if, especially in such a small theatre, whether the show might have been better un-miked.  Oddly enough, voices were rounded and clarity excellent when using the hand-held mikes, but this was not the case when Mirusia sang and spoke using only the ‘cheek’ clip-on mike.

I also felt Shannon Robinson, who sang very well, deserved to be introduced to the audience right at the beginning.  Even though it was great to hear her singing the Flower Duet with Mirusia later in the show, she looked left out of the group before that, even though we knew she was providing backing harmony.  In fact I would have liked at the beginning to have had a proper introduction to Shannon, Graeme Press and Leo Kram, with a little music played or sung by each.  In this way – in the Australian way – we would have felt more at home with a team of equals presenting the concert.


© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: The Widow Unplugged by Reg Livermore

The Widow Unplugged or An Actor Deploys written and performed by Reg Livermore.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, July 26 – September 1, 2018.

Director – Mark Kilmurry; Set and Costume Designer – Charles Davis; Lighting Designer – Christopher Page
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 19

I reckon Arthur Kwick, janitor, employed by awfully wealthy Gina Rinestone, CEO of Time and Tide Nursing Home, not only to keep the place clean (no swearing) and proper (what, no drinking!!?) but to keep the “children” entertained, got a bit confused about 1969.  It seems from his published history that his alter ego Reginald Liveforevermore didn’t actually play Widow Twankey in the pantomime Aladdin that year, but acted in The Mikado in a revue devised by William Orr at the Doncaster Theatre Restaurant, Kensington, Sydney.

This news is important as you will find later, but in the meantime you will enjoy absolutely this ockergenarian vaudevillain, full to the goog as he is of malapropisms galorious.  Since most of the Sunday afternoon audience at The Ensemble were, like me, about as old as Kwick and his creator – approaching 80 – it didn’t seem odd to find ourselves enrolled as a bit past it, needing to have things explained.  Laugh?  You wouldn’t believe it!

Now in straight review mode, let me explain that Reg Livermore is certainly not past anything.  He is as spry, verbally and intellectually on the ball as he was as Alfred P Doolittle in Opera Australia’s terrific My Fair Lady when he was still only 78 last year (reviewed here August 31, 2017).  He didn’t tell us, as Arthur Kwick, how he had trained with Hayes Gordon as a founder member of The Ensemble Theatre-in-the-Round in the late 1950s.  Like Kwick, my memory can be a bit unreliable nowadays, but it’s quite likely I saw the real Reg in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound in 1969, perhaps when I took students to observe Hayes Gordon directing a rehearsal (though that may have been for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel in 1971, which Reg wasn’t in).

I may seem to be rambling a bit, but this is how Livermore’s play works – wandering through the memories – at least for the first 45 minutes.  Then after an interval (essential for a visit to the dunny by that time), we see Reg as Kwick, as the Widow Twankey.  I had forgotten, from my very young days in England, how Aladdin was supposed to be a middle-eastern story (by those people with that religion, says Kwick – what’s it called?  You know with the mosques – that’s right, the Mosquitoes).  But Aladdin’s mother, Widow Twankey, runs a Chinese laundry (including laundering money, says Kwick), and racist Chinese jokes abound.  How did this happen?  Go to Wikipedia as I did, and you find that Kwick’s characterisation is true to the tradition: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widow_Twankey .  So Reg has done his homework – but I just wondered if his acting in The Mikado in 1969 had got mixed into Kwick’s story of acting Widow Twankey in that year for J.C. Williamson.
http://www.reglivermore.com/history.html

The importance of Livermore’s show is how, behind the humour, there is a story of an insecure living.  Arthur Kwick has a sad ending, as at the last a nurse cheerfully settles him in his bed in the tiny attic room that Gina Rinestone has given him.  He works for no more than board-and-lodging, and we realise – with sympathy and appreciation for the entertainment he has given us – that his erratic storytelling means he is really just another of the “children”, whose only way out is “through the back door”.

On the serious side, here we see in action the theme of the current Platform Paper by Mark Williams called Falling Through the Gaps (Currency Press) about “Our Artists’ Health and Welfare” (see this blog August 10, 2018). As Williams notes, “At the welfare level, there are terrible dangers of falling through the gaps between psychic satisfaction and material security in their career path” and he mentions the fact that fame as an actor does not imply wealth or even health.  In Livermore’s play, Gina Rinestone (ie Australia’s wealthiest woman) is the opposite of Arthur Kwick, the dedicated actor sleeping on the streets after his men’s home burns down (not because they were smoking, he assures us). 

He talks his way into the janitor’s job (that’s the skill he has as an actor): though it’s only one step up from the vagrant’s home, and Gina won’t let him smoke, it’s the best security he can get – at the age of nearly 80.  Of course, it’s not my place to ask personal questions, but Reg Livermore’s Arthur Kwick ends up in the same place as Helen Mitchell, that is Dame Nellie Melba, who died in poverty.

Let’s just hope that Reg will live for quite a while yet, even though Liveforevermore is just my little joke.  He has an AO award already, and now deserves to be gonged a Living Treasure.

Left:
Dan Leno
as Widow Twankey
Theatre Royal
Drury Lane
London 1896
Photo: Alfred Ellis

Right:
Reg Livermore as Arthur Kwick as Widow Twankey








© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Circus Oz - Model Citizens

Circus Oz – Model Citizens, at Canberra Theatre Centre, August 17-18, 2018.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 17

“Circus Oz explodes back onto stage, audaciously unpacking the myths of modern Australia in their latest high octane circus show Model Citizens, the first creation fuelled by new Artistic Director Rob Tannion.

Model Citizens seamlessly blends the risk and beauty of breathtaking physical improbability with theatricality, choreography and Circus Oz’s distinct brand of Australian humour.”

There’s always a risk in pumping up the promotion that expectations might not be met.  This time around, Circus Oz needs more dramaturgy to create a clear storyline to unpack the "myths of Modern Australia" and a lot more originality in choreographic design to reach the heights of distinct Australian humour for which the company was famous from its beginning.

I suppose it is unfair or at least unfortunate for the young, and very competent, performers today to be judged by this particular critic who was lucky enough to see that wildly satirical and sometimes quite gruesome 1978 performance.  The title Model Citizens would seem to open up possibilities, but apart from a meaty song about diversity – “but not in my backyard” – and another about loving one’s Weber (which has probably mainly served to increase that brand’s sales), the humour was mildly funny and the message sometimes a bit too obvious and other times just lost in the physical improbability.

The set design of a nondescript kind of diagonal wall with an inconsequential turret at each end was hard to interpret.  A prison wall perhaps, but the message never came through.  It kept the very busy two-person orchestra partially hidden, and it seemed to be used only to give the fire-breather (who was rather frightening to the very young children near me) an access to the high wire – or rather high horizontal rope ladder – which was cleverly used to make human trapezes.

Perhaps, considering the very high proportion of very young popcorn munchers in the audience (who dismally failed the opening instructions, including to always clean up your mess – which did suggest more biting satire to come); perhaps it was OK to keep the intellectual level simple.  Of course the show was enjoyable, what with a kelpie chasing sheep all over the paddock (that is, where we were sitting), the gymnastic skills good (though I have seen better), and live musical accompaniment very effective.

So, entertaining in an ordinary sort of circus way, but not quite the explosive, audacious, and improbably absurd Circus Oz I have come to know and love.

Photos by Rob Blackburn

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Calamity Jane - Hayes Theatre Co

Calamity Jane adapted by Ronald Hanmer and Phil Park, from the stage play by Charles K. Freeman, after Warner Bros. film written by James O’Hanlon.  Lyrics by Paul Francis Webster.  Music by Sammy Fain.

Presented by One Eyed Man Productions in association with Neglected Musicals & Hayes Theatre Co.  At Canberra Theatre Playhouse, August 16-19, 2018.

Director – Richard Carroll; Musical Director – Nigel Ubrihien; Choreographer – Cameron Mitchell; Production Designer – Lauren Peters; Lighting Designer – Trent Suidgeest; Sound designer and Operator – Camden Young; Wig Designer – Lauren Proitti

Tony Taylor as Henry Miller, Nigel Ubrihien on piano
Hayes Theatre Co: Calamity Jane 2018
Photo: Jeff Busby

Reviewed by Frank (Francis) McKone
August 16

With the intelligence and wit that would make a David Pope cartoon proud, Hayes Theatre’s Calamity Jane makes America Great Again, even outshining the original 1963 Broadway production (which you can still see on the eighth wonder of the modern world, Youtube, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snpqpLmOa4o ).  Carol Burnett’s Calamity was a comic performance par excellence; yet Virginia Gay, as directed by Richard Carroll takes us to a different level of interpretation.

Anthony Gooley, Sheridan Harbridge, Virginia Gay, Rob Johnson, Laura Bunting
Hayes Theatre Co: Calamity Jane 2018
Photo: John McRae

In 1963 Calamity was undoubtedly a woman challenging the norms of women’s behaviour, gun-toting on stage, while immediately and publicly making up to and making out with Lt. Danny Gilmartin (Matthew Pearce 2018) at first contact.  And it’s true that her speech demanding that Katie Brown be given the chance to prove herself – “do it your own way” – was a convention-breaking message in the transition to new feminism from the 1950s’ ‘little woman’.  Culminating in her threat to put her fist down Wild Bill Hickock’s throat and peel him like a banana, Burnett was more than funny: her audience cheered in 1963. Did Doris Day match this in the original 1953 movie?

The next scene, A Woman’s Touch, gives us a clue to the Hayes Theatre approach.  Is it possible that Calamity is Trans – sexual, gender – or maybe L or at least Bi?  In 1963 a woman’s touch meant a comic transition for Calamity as Katie Brown dresses her prettily as a conventional woman (spot-on performance by Laura Bunting 2018).  In 2018, there are hints of a ‘touch’ of a different kind, as if Virginia Gay is playing a friendly joke upon her surprisingly appropriate real name.

Of course, in the end Calamity’s being unsure of her sexuality is resolved into a straight scene of three plainly male-female marriages, in the tradition of romantic comedy going back to Shakespeare’s parallel Much Ado About Nothing. Think of Benedick as Wild Bill Hickock: the men’s names are telling – try saying them out loud with emphasis on the last syllable (and a great performance by Anthony Gooley) and Beatrice as Calamity (a fascinating complex characterisation by Gay).

Foreground: Anthony Gooley, Virgina Gay, Laura Bunting, Matthew Pearce
Background: Nigel Ubrihien, Tony Taylor, Rob Johnson, Sheridan Harbridge
in Hayes Theatre Co: Calamity Jane 2018
Photo: John McRae

Then, the other clever aspect of this production, which I guess couldn’t have been done on old Broadway, was Richard Carroll and Lauren Peters’ involvement of the audience.  It was fun to have a few tables on stage in the Golden Garter Saloon, but the really clever bits were the references to Canberra as if it were Deadwood, and today’s politics squeezed in, including Donald Trump’s famous claim.

When we really thought an irate audience member was attempting to get in late, knocking furiously on a door near us, with an attendant firmly explaining no-one would be let in until the next song-and-dance number (which we supposed would cover the disturbance of his entry), the door was finally burst open to the horror of all on stage, to reveal Rob Johnson as a wonderful Francis (not Frances) Fryer, just off his stage coach and determined to persuade Henry Miller (a strong performance by Tony Taylor) to let him perform, and finally to marry his ‘niece’ Susan (an excellent performance by Sheridan Harbridge, who also played Adelaide Adams in Chicago and who was never going to perform in, shudder, Deadwood). 

And, more fool us, we were even found ourselves standing for a full house ovation! 

Except, of course, the quality of the acting, singing and dancing deserved it.  Hayes Theatre’s Calamity Jane is entertainment plus.  An essential part of the plus is musical director Nigel Ubrihien, with a terrific ragtime style on piano (better, I think, than the big-band production on Broadway – more ‘right’ for Deadwood’s Golden Garter, and a much more personal feel for this small-cast production).

More subtle in design and characterisaton, with not a shot fired on stage, this Calamity Jane is definitely not to be missed.

Virginia Gay as Calamity Jane

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2018: Mark Williams: Falling Through the Gaps - Platform Papers No 56

Falling Through the Gaps: Our artists’ health and welfare by Mark R.W. Williams.  Platform Paper No 56, Currency House, Sydney, August 2018.

Commentary by Frank McKone

“Many giants stand on the shoulders of pygmies” is a comic insight well worthy of a lawyer who has spent his life on and off stage as much as in courts.  He acknowledges his wife, Fiona Gruber, for her “insights going back to a cast list for The School for Scandal in the 1770s containing RB Sheridan’s notes”. Sheridan wrote “scratch Groves”.  The Groves not chosen was an ancestor of  “the last of the Groves”, Gruber’s late uncle Donald, while earlier in the line was Fred Groves “who worked for Fred Karno’s circus and developed the silly walk that Charles Chaplin took over when Fred Groves left the company”.

“To the Groves family: you aren’t forgotten.”

The sense of humour is infectious but in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs “if self-actualisation sits at the top, and making and working with great works of art brings one towards it, some seekers will always struggle up to grasp it before they have a firm footing….So, keeping the prize firmly in view, let’s have a look at the base of Maslow’s pyramid for workers in the performing arts.  At the welfare level, there are terrible dangers of falling through the gaps between psychic satisfaction and material security in their career path.”

And so his Chapter 6 “From problems to solutions” begins:

From my own observations of the Australian and, to lesser extent, English performing arts scene, anyone of my generation who expected to have a career in the performing arts needed to start with the price of a house.  That’s right, start with it.

Williams’ purpose is not to wallow in stories of  performers living in poverty, drawn into dangerous use of alcohol or other drugs, or even committing suicide; nor of the difficulties of short-term and unpredictable employment, the need to move – often around the world – to follow the work, and the effects of these on family and personal mental stability.  He does make the point that the public’s perception of well-known performers as doing well for themselves is often out of touch with the reality that a big payout for one event (or even several events over years) which makes their name does not create what he calls a “longtail” income, or set them up with a comfortable retirement.

He does mention Helen Mitchell aka Nellie Melba as a case in point, though, and it is instructive to read the details of the provisions and lack of provisions for people working in the theatre industry, and the facts and figures about incomes and superannuation balances in comparison to other industries.

Williams’ purpose is to lay out practical structural steps “to fix the problems with which we find ourselves today”.  In brief:

 Industry superannuation funds trust deeds to make particular provisions for emergency and charitable support;
 Commercial funds to build in elements of social responsibility to support their members and the wider community;
 Government to consider a better salary sacrifice system for individuals in relatively good times of well-paid work to make additional contributions to their super via the PAYG system;
 Levy (say 5 cents) per ticket sold in Australia to live performance to fund super supplement for performers;
 Greater training and funding for dealing with health and mental health in the performing arts;
 Performing arts education institutions to teach realistically about the downside of being a creative performer, the protocols of good performance and the economics of the industry;
 Industry unions and producers to encourage whole-of-life support by companies.
 Benevolent funds to be inclusive…and avoid divisions of employment between ‘legitimate’ theatre, the media, variety and cabaret, circus, backstage and front-of-house.

I found Williams’ description of the situation and past history which has led to how the Australian industry operates made me think wider than employment in the arts.  He mentions in passing the similarities with what has begun to be called the ‘gig economy’, in which people are contracted for all sorts of jobs (the ‘gig’ – a word borrowed from the pop music industry, I think), without the protections and benefits of being ‘employees’.

This leads me to take seriously the moves already well underway in Europe towards a new system of supporting whole-of-life survival in the new life of flexible work and continuously changing technology.

The concept of Universal Basic Income, which is being trialled in Finland and elsewhere including Canada right now, may be well worth a visit.  There’s an interesting run-down of what’s happening (as of April 26, 2018) at https://www.wired.co.uk/article/finland-universal-basic-income-results-trial-cancelled

If you would like a more substantial discussion of Universal Basic Income (UBI), I invite you to look at the RSA article
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/02/pathways-towards-economic-security-and-universal-basic-income-new-rsa-report?id=utm_medium=newsletter/fellowship/260218

[The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is a still active 17th Century London-based, British organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges.  Disclosure: I am a Fellow of the RSA ANZ]

For a fun finish, read “I hated maths at school. It came back to bite me later.” by Danny Katz (Canberra Times, 10 August 2018).  He turns the Binomial Theorem into the Buy-no-meal Theorem and Differential Calculus into Depressional Calculus, and – consistent perhaps with Mark Williams’ arts education suggestion – demands that “ArtsMaths should become a proper subject, compulsory for all poncey gits, massive wankers and arty dickweeds” like him.
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/i-hated-maths-at-school-it-came-back-to-bite-me-later-20180809-p4zwij.html


© Frank McKone, Canberra